Whodunit Column by Bruce Tierney

For years, Joe Pike served as taciturn sidekick to Robert Crais’ wisecracking L.A. detective, Elvis Cole. Cole was nominally the brains of the outfit, while Pike carried the big stick, or perhaps more precisely,was the big stick. This time out, Pike takes the starring role in Crais’ latest thriller, The Sentry. Rescuing damsels in distress is Pike’s forte, and indeed...

Audio Column by Sukey Howard

The Two Minute Rule is a departure for Robert Crais, not part of his best-selling Elvis Cole detective series. Here, we get an odd couple tracking a devious, stop-at-nothing cop killer in a really riveting nail-biter. Max Holman, a career car thief, bank robber and all around reprobate, did an about-face during his 10 years in jail. Just released, he wants only to reconcile with his estranged...

Audio Column by Sukey Howard

Elvis Cole, the Hawaiian-shirt wearing, yellow-Corvette driving L.A. private investigator whose stone-faced best buddy, Pike, is just as tough as Hawk, makes a comeback in The Forgotten Man, vintage Crais narrated by James Daniels. Cole is still getting over the lingering ramifications of his last big case (check out The Last Detective) when he gets a call from the LAPD claiming his long-lost...

Whodunit Column by Bruce Tierney

I would not be the first to draw comparisons between Robert B. Parker's Spenser/Hawk characters and Robert Crais' dynamic duo, Elvis Cole and Joe Pike. Both lead detectives are witty, macho-yet-vulnerable, insightful and exceptionally verbal (both series are written in the first person, as all good P.I. series should be). The sidekicks are somewhat private and remote, loyal to a fault and...

Audio Column by Sukey Howard

Elvis Cole, star of Robert Crais' super-successful detective novels, usually has fun. Even when the sleuthing gets rough, he cracks wisecracks while he cracks the case. Not so in Crais' latest and best so far, The Last Detective, read with compelling intensity by James Daniels. This case gets to Elvis in a visceral way. The 10-year-old son of his inamorata, Lucy Chenier, has been kidnapped,...

Whodunit Column by Bruce Tierney

In Robert Crais' latest, The Last Detective, freewheeling PI Elvis Cole returns to team up with LAPD Detective Carol Starkey (from Demolition Angel) and longtime sidekick Joe Pike in the search for a missing boy. The child is Ben Chenier son of Cole's attorney amour, Lucy Chenier and he vanishes from Cole's Laurel Canyon deck while our hero prepares dinner just a few feet away. Everyone would...

Audio Column by Sukey Howard

Whodunit Column by Bruce Tierney

In Demolition Angel, author Robert Crais introduces a female protagonist, Carol Starkey, a one-time bomb squad member who was disfigured and nearly killed by the bomb that took her partner's life. Three years later, as a police investigator in the LAPD Criminal Conspiracy Section, Carol is called in to investigate the aftermath of another bomb, an explosion that has taken the life of one of her...

Audio Column by James Buckley

Elvis has left the city L.A. Requiem, the eighth and newest Elvis Cole novel by Robert Crais, is like a bride: it brings something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue. The old is the familiar pairing of Los Angeles private eye Elvis Cole and his partner, the violent yet noble Joe Pike. The new is that much of this story is told in third-person some from Pike's point of...